Lenin continues in the same vein as Nietzsche, that is, by reducing analysis to the very point where he has cut away all flesh and finds himself scratching at the bone. An analysis looking only at the most basic prerequisite for existence. An analysis that deals with raw power and nothing else.

We start with the observation that the progressive politician will always have an agenda that is different from the regular citizen. Basically, the political class has an interest in expanding its powers and making it difficult for outsiders to threaten their privileges. Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, are simply interested in having their country governed evenly so that they can mind their jobs and raise their families in relatively safe and ordinary societies. If it were up to them, politicians would simply make sure that basic law and order were in place, that public institutions were reliable, and that the public finances were largely balanced.

However, if the citizens were to get their wish, this would make the politician’s job the dullest in the world. It would also render politics a risky career path, as politicians would often be voted out of office when they did do what the ordinary citizen wanted them to do. It would be a throwback to societies like 18th century England, where being a politician was not a career path so much as it was simply a kind of public trust; a service one does for his society and which is primarily handled by those who already live a financially-secure existence.

In order to secure the office of politician as a viable way of life, and to extend their powers, it is therefore necessary for the political class to undertake an attack on the core of a society, namely the ordinary citizens — that is to say, those snuffy people who quietly mind their work and just want to lead a life in tune with traditional values. This is where Leninism comes in. In the period after the Russian Revolution, it was necessary to find allies for the new political class that could support the new Soviet regime in their efforts against ordinary, conservatively minded citizens — commonplace people who would rather have opted out of the collectivization of property rights and the political class’ wish to transform them into the new altruistic Soviet human being. In doing so, they found new allies by taking homosexuals, atheists, and poor people of foreign ethnicity and propping them up with political power, ordained by the system. In other words, people who hitherto had nothing, and who had stood outside the sphere of bourgeois acceptance, became the allies of the political class in the newly created political order. Not only did the political class thereby ensure unprecedented loyalty from their new henchmen; they also succeeded in offending the traditional sensibilities of the regular people.

Today, Liberals and Conservatives often talk about which societal groups are net tax beneficiaries and which groups are net tax burden bearers in the grand redistributive scheme that goes on in modern economies. This is an interesting question but, as we know, Lenin was pretty economically illiterate. Thus, the most important take-away of this analysis is not economic; it is cultural.

If we assume that there is still a core of traditionally-minded people with petty bourgeois values ​​in modern societies, the minds of these people must be constantly cowed by the political class to prevent them from setting up the political system in accordance with what they want and not what the political class wants. Thus, political patronage must be continually offered to groups that instinctively violate the sensibilities of the common people. In the past these groups were homosexuals, atheists, and poor people of foreign ethnicities. Today, these same groups could be transsexuals, who aggressively demand to be addressed with obscure pronouns, artists who do not produce art normal people find pleasing, and people of foreign ethnicities who refuse to integrate into Western societies. The political class needs loyal supporters and these marginalized groups would have nothing without the patronage of the political class. In this way, the different peripheral groups of society have an interest in banding together and exercising structural violence against the core of society, that is, normal, traditional, petty bourgeois-minded people.

One can, of course, say that the core also exercises violence against the peripheries by not voting for politicians with great progressive visions, not buying or respecting the art of postmodern artists, and by discriminating against transsexuals and members of ethnic minorities. However, like the question of who are the net tax beneficiaries and who are net tax burden bearers in the great taxation and redistribution scheme of modern societies, we know how the core suppresses the peripheries, because we’ve all heard that analysis a million times. It is therefore far more interesting to look at how the peripheries also suppress the middle.

Some of the most interesting writings on the middle works when the political class is relatively weak, and can be found in David Hume’s analysis of the bourgeois virtues, a view that is also referenced and explored from different angles in professor Deirdre McCloskey’s book The Bourgeois Virtues. The bourgeois morality is initially skeptical and discriminatory against the new and unknown, but as time passes more and more of what originally stood outside of bourgeois morality will be accepted by ordinary people as they interact with peripheral groups and discover that the outsiders were not as bad as they thought. Thus, gays and atheists are almost completely integrated into modern societies while, however, the image is more mixed with regard to ethnic minorities.

As said, the purpose of extending patronage to marginalized groups is to create loyal henchmen for the progressive political class on the one hand, and to the cow the sensibilities of petty bourgeois people on the other. Viewed through this lens, it is interesting to note that progressives tend disown their allies as soon as these groups begin to be accepted by the petty bourgeois. For example, progressive voices have recently distanced themselves from white male homosexuals, saying that they no longer belong in the left’s alliance. As well, they openly supported discrimination against East Asian immigrants who excel in the educational system. I’ll put links to this in the video description below. This may initially seem hypocritical, but viewed through the lens of Leninism, the cause is obvious. When such groups begin to be accepted by the core of society, their loyalty to the political class is no longer guaranteed, nor can these peripheral groups be used to offend the sensitivities of traditionally-minded people. Leninism thus explains the rationale behind the American essayist Larry Auster’s first law: The worse a minority group behaves, the more valuable it will be for the progressive; conversely, the better it behaves, the less value it will have for progressives.

But why is it necessary to cow the sensitivity of normal people?, one might ask. It is a good tactic because it proclaims to ordinary people that the political domain is not theirs; that they should stay out of it. When a majority of the traditionally-minded people are frightened to speak their minds — fearing to be branded as racists who don’t like foreign people, hillbillies who are not sophisticated enough for modern art, or transphobes — this is a sign that progressives know that they are dominating the cultural narrative in society. The petty bourgeois must be afraid to say and think that modern art is unaesthetic, that certain ethnic minorities behave problematically, and that there are only two genders. They must be made to follow the orthodoxy that the political class has set before them.

This orthodoxy may not be in accordance with truth, but that just makes it even more valuable. If you are familiar with domination tactics, you will know that a good way to bully people is to make them repeat one’s nonsense. Anyone can believe in the truth, but boundless loyalty and submission will only be obtained when someone accepts the untruths you want them to. “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” as they say in 1984.

Thus, cowed in this way, ordinary people have internalized the judgment that their natural sentiments are loathsome and that their wishes for society are illegitimate. Intimidated and dominated, they take on the message that it is safer for them not to speak up; to simply mind their jobs and families while leaving political power, control of their tax money, and dominance over the narrative to the progressive political class. Some may even have internalized this attack against them to the point where they are no longer able to access their true emotions for fear of being called out as racists, transphobes, and the like. They have thus unwillingly become agents in their own oppression.

This time we’ll be looking into whether Kreia is a Mary Sue.
A Mary Sue is an overpowered and perfectly good character with no explanation given for that power level. A Mary Sue is typically instantly liked by all of the established characters, yet at the same time a Mary Sue doesn’t have much of an actual personality. Mary Sues are also instantly liked for no apparent reason, and because of this Mary Sues feel like a wish-fulfilment fantasy more than they feel like actual characters in the story. Finally, being perfectly good and overpowered, typical Mary Sues are also never embarrassed and never fail in important ways, which is one reason Mary Sues are typically considered bad screenwriting.
So let’s find out if Kreia is a Mary Sue.
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First, we’ll look at whether Kreia is overpowered. This answer is clearly in the positive; as seen when she one-shots three Jedi masters with a single force power. She can also overpower Atton’s mind, even though Atton is trained in resisting Jedi mind probes. She manipulates others easily, brings people back from death, and manages to conceal herself from the Jedi council throughout most of the story. We are also repeatedly given hints that Kreia is very powerful, such as when we are told that only the strongest force users fought in the Mandolorian Wars, which is something that she did. And the official game guide even tells us that Kreia has access to many esoteric Force Powers that are not known by the Jedi and Sith.
So Kreia is clearly very powerful. But is she also overpowered? We’ll answer that in conjunction with our next point.
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Our next itinerary on the Mary Sue index is to find out whether Kreia’s power level is unexplained. Here, we could say that, yes – Kreia is shown to be very old. Her past is shrouded in mystery, and even the things we do know of her do not tell us why she should be so powerful. So it seems that Kreia’s power level is indeed unexplained.
However, even though her powers are unexplained, Kreia doesn’t fit the Mary Sue mold all too well. A Mary Sue is typically young and/or the main character. In the original Mary Sue story, A Trekkie’s Tale, which coined the term “Mary Sue,” the Mary Sue is only 15 and a half years old. If you have a character who is older and wiser, and fills the function of acting as teacher to the main character, that character is typically not a Mary Sue, but a paragon.
Obi-Wan and Yoda are paragons to Luke in the original trilogy. Both are older and wiser, and teach Luke as Kreia teaches the main character. And both are shown to be more powerful than Luke. Likewise, though some of their backstory is later reveled in the prequels, their past and the way they acquired their powers are still shrouded in mystery. By itself, this doesn’t make Obi-Wan and Yoda Mary Sues, since as characters they don’t fulfill the same role in the story that Luke, Anakin, Rey, or the main character of KOTOR2 do.
Going strictly by the numbers, we could therefore say that, yes, Kreia does have an unexplained power level, but no, that does not count towards her Mary Sue-ness. But you know what? Just to be extra fair, let’s just say it counts anyway and give Kreia a point for having an unexplained power level.
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Next we will look at the question of whether Kreia is perfectly good. Throughout the game, Kreia is repeatedly shown not to be perfectly good. Then again, she isn’t exactly evil either. She gives the main character a barrage of lessons, all from different points of view. She aims to broaden one’s view of the implications of one’s actions, and views both good and evil as faulty extremes. She will scold you for committing overly strongly to either the light or the dark side of the force. And she teaches that there is value in deception, suspicion, and betrayal, just as there can be value in preventing suffering. Thus, for our purposes, we can clearly conclude that Kreia is not perfectly good.
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Let us look at whether Kreia has a personality, then. There are many ways to answer this question, and all of them lead to a definite yes. Kreia is intelligent, haughty, disagreeable, immodest, nonconforming, rational, intellectual, strong-willed, goal-oriented, and individualistic. If we take someone whom we would say had no personality, we would think of someone who had few definite or unique characteristics; someone who seems to drift along, acting on default instinct and morality without adding much in terms of personal values or atypical reasoning to their actions. We would think of someone like Rey. Kreia is the complete opposite of that. She is modeled on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that most people’s lives are a quotation; an imitation of the values and expectations that have been handed down to them and taught that we need to go beyond these defaults to become who we truly are. Fitting in with neither Jedi nor Sith, this is exactly what Kreia has done, whereas Rey, on the other hand, has so far spent two movies just drifting along, letting herself be defined by whatever conditions she finds herself in.
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We also have to answer the question of whether Kreia is instantly liked for no apparent reason. Here it is clear that she is not. Most people who come into contact with her dislike her. We have already mentioned that both the Jedi and the Sith cast her out. We can add that she must manipulate the people around her in order to get them to do what she says. She also manipulates the main character of KOTOR2 into believing that their force bond is lethal, so that the main character will stick with her and protect her, even though it is not. In general, Kreia tricks people and uses her power in order to get others to accept her and stand her company. Kreia even tells us herself that she is not well-liked. So the answer is clearly in the negative here.
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Does Kreia feel like a wish-fulfilment fantasy then? A wish-fulfilment is like a daydream where the typical frustrations of life are turned upside down. Someone who is not very beautiful, rich, powerful, or well-liked experiences a fantasy where they have all these qualities in abundance. However, as we have already touched upon, Kreia’s role in the story is that of paragon, not main character. It is difficult for the audience to identify with her in the same way that many might be able to identify with Luke or Rey. Likewise, though she may be powerful, Kreia is old, not beautiful, not well-liked, and has several alienating qualities. We have already mentioned how her personality does not fit the bill of a wish-fulfilment fantasy. And likewise, her indifference to her physical health, her inability to make true friends, and her lack of sympathetic qualities all count against her seeming to be a wish fulfilment too.
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Finally, we must turn to the question of whether Kreia is embarrassed or fails. Here it is clear that she fails a number of times. She is rejected by both Jedi and Sith, she loses her hand to Darth Sion, she loses the final battle against the main character, and she fails in her ultimate goal of bringing death to the Force.
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Thus, tallying up the final score, Kreia gets 2 out of 7 for being overpowered and for having an unexplained power level. But that is only if we are being generous and following the letter of the law. If we allow for the fact that Kreia is a paragon, not a main character or everyman, her true Mary Sue score is 0 out of 7, leaving her final Mary Sue score at 28.6% — or 0%, depending on how you look at it.
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“But wait!” you may say, “I thought the reason people don’t like Rey was that they were afraid of strong woman characters; that they feel threatened by strong women. I mean, JJ Abrams and Daisy Ridley, , basically told us as much. So isn’t it odd that Kreia is one of the most well-liked characters among the fanbase – and a woman? It’s almost as if people’s problem with Rey isn’t that she is a woman, but that she is a horrible, boring character and a perfect Mary Sue. But what do I know? I mean, *I* wasn’t the one who came up with the masterpiece that was The Force Awakens.

The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, whom some consider to be the most important person in Buddhism besides the Buddha himself, sums up his view of reality in the following statement:

In teaching the doctrine, the enlightened ones rely on two truths, empirical and transcendent. Those who do not differentiate these truths do not understand the profound reality of the doctrine. Without recourse to empirical truth, the transcendental truth cannot be shown. Without the transcendental truth, ultimate reality cannot be realized.

This statement is remarkably close to some of the things Jung said about the cognitive functions, and which the Jungian analyst and philosopher Marilyn Nagy have explored in her book, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung.

This way of viewing cognition holds that reality cannot be known apart from mental consciousness and that the mental processes inherent in consciousness predispose us to view reality in certain ways. I have explored this theme further in my own article, Determining Function Axes, Part 6, which is available to members on our website.

According to this way of viewing the functions, as long as we are bound by our functions, we can never really know the nature of reality, but only partial appropriations of it, which are determined in part by our mental processes. But all mental processes have two weaknesses:

1: They are prejudiced to experience reality in accordance with their overall nature, preferences, and biases.

2: All cognitive functions presuppose conceptual bifurcation, that is, dividing things into subject and object, while the true reality, which we are synthesizing in our minds by way of cognitive processes, is really free of such contradictions.

It is thus only by going beyond our functions that we can be allowed to see reality in its true transcendent state, free of our own biases. But we all start out bound by our functions. That is why Nagarjuna said that without recourse to empirical truth, the transcendental truth cannot be shown. We must start with a conditioned understanding of how our empirical consciousness is limited before we can reach the transcendental stage and see absolute reality for ourselves.

But it is very hard to reach this stage, since, to the untrained mind, the distance between seeing reality and epistemically dividing it into subject and object is so short that most people never notice they are doing it. They end up believing that their own mental constructions are ultimately real and thus become entrapped by their own functions. The cognitive process becomes the arbiter of reality, rather than reality in itself.

In his work, Jung appeared to be split between a purely diagnostic approach to typology, which we have linked to the work of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In Psychological Types, just traces another approach to typology, where the diagnostic phase is succeeded by the need to liberate oneself from the functions to Taoism and the Upanishads. At the time where he wrote Psychological Types, he did not appear to be familiar with Mahayana Buddhism, but had he been, he would no doubt have recognized that this was, in a sense, the same thing Nagarjuna was talking about, and which certain Zen masters have taught. I have also personally suggested that one might find some inkling of this mindset in the heritage left to us by the Greek philosopher Anaximander. I explored this theme in my article The Anaximanderian Conception of Function Axes.

In a way, you could say that the task of explaining this point to people who are not in tune with the primordial cognitive state extolled by Buddhism is a bit like the task of trying to explain to someone who is sober what it is like to be under the influence of mind altering drugs. Only from the Buddhist point of view, it is man’s everyday empirical consciousness that corresponds to being under the influence while the primordial state of consciousness corresponds to sobriety. Or as the Buddhists like to call it: The true nature of reality.

That is why most expositions on the merits of such cognitive states will invariably have a bit of a bait and switch flavour to them: If the listener has not undergone serious meditative training, he or she will only have a vague idea of what such a state is like. He will most certainly not have the first-hand phenomenological experience of what it is like to undergo such a vision, nor the completely doubt-less feeling that accompanies it which tells you that what the Buddhists have been talking about for aeons is correct and that this state of consciousness is far more in tune with the true nature of reality that the empirical understanding we construct for ourselves by way of our functions and that most people live under through their entire lives. Only when we liberate ourselves from the functions; from the dichotomy of subject and object; from the narrative fictions we spin for ourselves, and from the lie of thinghood will we try be able to go beyond our functions and see reality as it truly is.

That is why the Zen master Pang Yun said that the essence of awakening to true reality is to eat all day and not swallow a grain of rice; to walk all day and not tread an inch of ground; to have no distinction at all between subject and object and to be inseparable from all things all day long; this is the nature of true cognitive liberation.

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